Legal Commentary

Another Wrongful Conviction in Houston

By TChris

Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt insists his department bears no responsibility for Ricardo Rachell's wrongful arrest, conviction, and incarceration. When the police arrested Rachell for sexually assaulting a minor, they recovered physical evidence that could have been tested for DNA. The department's notoriously unreliable crime lab had been closed, so the evidence wasn't tested. Prosecutors didn't order DNA testing and nobody told the defense that the evidence existed.

While Rachell was in jail, the officers involved in his arrest investigated a string of similar assaults in their district. If that fact caused them any concern for Rachell's innocence, they did nothing about it.

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Jurors sentenced Rachell to 40 years in prison in a case built largely on eyewitness testimony from the victim and one of his 8-year-old friends. More than five years later, DNA evidence — available but never tested before Rachell's trial — cleared him of any involvement in the attack. ...

Eventually, DNA evidence linked registered sex offender Andrew Wayne Hawthorne to at least one of those assaults, and he pleaded guilty in three cases. He is serving a 60-year prison sentence.

There's plenty of blame to distribute, but the Houston Police Department deserves a large slice.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on December 20, 2008 (boomark / email).